Replies

Some western minds do know the problem. In this case, the problem is Condi Rice. Her belief in the niceness of North Korea, and a belief that they would not tell a lie let them keep proliferating nuclear weapons to this day.

It's not like planes crashing into government buildings (via Kamekaze rather than jihadi) wasn't out there in the popular fiction. Clancy also had a plot line about attacking Wall Street. It takes a complete lack of imagination to not check popular fiction plot lines for possible threats when you believe we are in a state of war against terrorists.

Condi Rice could have been told directly about 9/11 plans by Bin Laden himself, and she would have thought it too fantastic to believe, and too inflammatory to bring to Bush. National Security Advisors are supposed to have a bit of paranoia about them. Condi can't seem to believe anything really bad about anybody.

North Korea had nuclear weapons long before Rice became Secretary of State and probably even before Bush took office. It was Madeline Halfbright who was naive about North Korea. President Bush included North Korea in the “Axis of Evil”, a position that Rice surely agreed with.

With regards to 9/11, Bush chose Rice as his NSA in part because she was an recognized expert on terrorism. She gave speeches on the threat of Islamic terrorism and I believe Bush even made it a campaign issue in 2000. During her first few months on the job she wrote a plan to go after Al Qaeda which was on President Bush's desk on 9/10/01 for his review.